Mixed Fiction

Six FEET OF THE COUNTRY by Nadine Gordimer (241 pp.; Simon & Schusfer; $3.50), contains two sorts of short stories, those that pack a punch and those that shade a nuance. The hard-hitting tales are about the tensions of race relations, a subject that a South African writer like 32-year-old Nadine Gordimer (The Lying Days) can no more evade than a tongue can skirt a newly empty tooth socket. Author Gordimer's tactic is to blanket both races in a fog of routinely benevolent relationships and then lift it suddenly, revealing the complacent whites standing on the edge of an emotional abyss. A kindly farming couple find a strange black boy dead of pneumonia. He proves to be an out-of-bounds native, and they suddenly learn that for months their farmhands have been smuggling fellow blacks into Johannesburg. "You would think they would have felt they could tell us," says the wife bewilderedly. A Johannesburg housewife is about to leave on a European vacation, leaving her children in the charge of a black "mammy." Then she learns that the trusted mammy has just strangled her own newborn baby and tossed it into a roadside ditch. Even in the stories where the meaning is caught in a web of nuance, there are. still revelations. A woman determinedly denies her love to her stepchild with the noble but misguided intent of preserving the child's love for his real mother; she ends by alienating the child from both. Enemies, a study of the egoism of old age, suggests that the old relish nothing so much as the death of fellow oldsters.

Author Gordimer's talent is diamond-hard and diamond-bright, her craftsmanship impeccable. But the stream of life rarely flows recklessly through her pages; it is banked, locked and graded like a smoothly run canal.

THE FIELD OF VISION, by Wright Morris (251 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.50), takes a handful of "Sears Roebuck Gothic" Midwesterners, sits them in the stands of a Mexican bull ring, and has them re-fight the few past moments of truth in their lives. What dies in the ring is flesh; what has already perished in the stands is hope, mind and spirit. Among the fatally gored spectators: an icy arch-mom, the "chaste virginal mother of three"; her husband, a man who has transferred what little emotional-venture capital he once had into 3% matrimonial bonds; their grandson, a mobile Davy Crockett brat; a one-shot bohemian playwright who carries a pants pocket he once tore from Ty Cobb's uniform as a lucky charm; a transvestite and his keeper, a German-born quack psychoanalyst who unnerves his Midwestern patients by drowning out their confessionals with his record player and hissing: "Moww-Tzzzzzzarrrrt isss spikink."

This collection of oddballs is wryly amusing as well as highly implausible. There is no plot, and the characters impinge on each other as temperaments rather than as people. All the action is in flashback, and the key act is a long-ago kiss stolen by the playwright from the virginal mother of three, a kiss that somehow set in motion for the woman and her future husband and children that secret civil war between Puritanism and passion, a war of the blood more openly and obviously dramatized by Author Morris in the spectacle of bloodless Americans watching the bloodfest of the bull ring. Always a novelist to watch, if not to cheer, Author Morris has also captured the poignance of the lonely in the gregarious accents of Midwest speech. At novel's end there is a fracas in the bull ring, and the boy with the Davy Crockett hat touches the still-warm hide of the bull. It is the aptest symbol for what is wrong with this consistently intelligent but overly symbolized novel -- still warm but, by the narrowest of margins, dead.

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